Today I was checking RareWares' links page to find broken links, and happened upon Xiph's page. I noticed the "news" there were 3-4 years old.

So I was wondering, does anyone, by any chance, know what is going on there? Are they working on Vorbis2, or Tarkin, or Theora? Have they disbanded and only the web pages remain? I remember that in Emmett's time, he would feed us news non-stop, mostly from #vorbis (he was a little too loud, matter of factly :B). Now, we listen nothing but crickets.

Do we have some insider here that knows if something is going on there, at all? Maybe Coalson or Valin?

And what the hell is Emmett up to anyway?

Thanks for any info.

R.

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Get up-to-date binaries of Lame, AAC, Vorbis and much more at RareWares:http://www.rarewares.org

I've been working on a few different things in a few different areas, but for the most part I've been writing new things and managing things here at Sonivius, which is my production company here in Philadelphia. It's nice to know that people still care. :)

As far as what Xiph is doing, I've got no idea -- I'm out of the scene as anything but a content producer.

It seems as though people are kinda pissed off about how it seems that nothing is happening over there. I can't really blame them, but I would caution against making too many assumptions. They could be hard at work on something new and interesting -- I suspect that someone 'in the know' will drop in soon enough and give a full download.

I've been thinking about the current situation of free-and-open tools for multimedia production a lot (I work with this stuff every day), and I can't help but think that it might be time to open up a research and development lab here at Sonivius to make things work a little better.

One of the things that kinda bugs me is that there's a lot of good stuff out there, but it's locked up in libraries and applications that are a pain in the ass to find, dependencies to manage... From a production standpoint, it's very annoying. What version are we using? Is there some guy halfway across the world with a better version that we should be using, and do we have to be subscribed to an arcane mailing list to know about it? Do we really need to set up a Linux box with a solid dev environment and compile things just to encode some video?

These kinds of questions are easy to answer for the kind of people that hang out on HA and check IRC and subscribe to mailing lists. I'm a producer that has that kind of connection, but I don't know anyone else like me that wants to take this kind of time to get work done. The last-mile of free and open multimedia solutions kinda sucks. Actually, it doesn't kinda suck, it sucks a lot.